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In this post, we explore how developer marketing practices can help to motivate & engage users and improve DX along the downstream developer journey stages in order to generate a viral loop — i.e. the process in which your acquired users become portal advocates and help drive adoption on your developer portal.

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Developer portals play not only a technical role, they also play a somewhat obscure commercial role. We don't like to say that this is a commercial site, but actually it is also about promotion. You have to explain what you do – preferably not in a hard-core manipulative way. For that, you need more than reference docs. How to get started? What does that API do? A lot more than just the very technical aspects need to be explained.

A less well circulated purpose of developer portals is their being a trust signal. They engender trust by showing how much investment went into building that portal. They have to show that the API services documented on that portal will keep on existing and will get reliable support long term.

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API friction can be seen as the inverse of developer experience, and it is a great conceptual device to help you identify issues in your API products. To create a great developer experience (DX), it is important to remove as much friction as possible from the developer’s journey.

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What information is absolutely essential on a developer portal? What kind of API documentation do you need? Is there a best practice that can be followed when launching a developer portal? We formulated 11 questions and built 3 mock sitemaps that demonstrate how portals can address the different stages of the developer journey.

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Should use cases and case studies be part of your API documentation? They play two crucial roles on a developer portal: They act as social proof for your API product (sales function) and they can be an introduction to more specific, implementation scenario documentation types.
We explored these fringe documentation types, both on business sites and developer portals, of 18 API companies with different profiles.

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A developer portal is more than just the documentation for an API. As a sort of self-service support hub, it is a key DevRel tool that helps an organization to provide the best possible developer experience for its APIs. A developer portal has a role in support, marketing, sales, and engineering. A conversation on the #documenting-apis WTD slack channel sparked the idea for this blog post.

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Seven years ago I had the chance to visit China, and I had a great time exploring the cultural heritage, large cities and gastronomy. So when my talk got accepted for the first DevRelCon in Asia, I was excited to see China again — this time from a professional point of view.

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Most of the time when we talk about developer experience, we mean downstream DX, the experience of developers that implement APIs. But what about the developers that create APIs?
In a previous post we wrote about the 8 stakeholders of developer portals, we argued that while the developers that use APIs are important, we shouldn’t forget about the experience of other stakeholders of a developer portal. In this post I’ll explore the experience of one of these audiences - the API developers - and explain what upstream DX is, when it matters, and how you can use a developer portal to improve it.